Goldfinger (1964)

Goldfinger (1964)

Director: Guy Hamilton

Starring: Sean Connery

James Bond is back in action! Everything he touches turns to excitement!

So Goldfinger is without question the most famous James Bond movie of them all. From the pre-title sequence where Bond unzips a wetsuit to reveal a pristine white tuxedo underneath, to Shirley Bassey blaring out the titular theme tune, to Oddjob decapitating a statue with his hat, to Pussy Galore’s introduction “I must be dreaming”, to the gadget-laden Aston Martin DB5 with ejector seat “I never joke about my work 007”, to the laser scene “Do you expect me to talk?” “No Mr Bond I expect you to die!” and perhaps the most iconic moment in all Bond films, even more so than Ursula Andress emerging from the sea, Shirley Eaton’s dead body painted gold.

This movie feels like a ‘Greatest Hits’ package more than a film and you can see why this movie is credited for being the one that created the so-called “Bond formula” and while I think that all started really in From Russia with Love it was with Goldfinger that Bond movies kind of became their own genre. I mean what genre would you classify Goldfinger in? You have your Bond’s like From Russia with Love and The Living Daylighs that you could label as spy thrillers, your pure action revenge flicks like License to Kill and Quantum of Solace but Goldfinger is… well, it’s a Bond film and there’s really nothing else like it apart from the inferior clones within its own series. So maybe we should just break down the Bond formula to see how well it holds up.

They say a good hero is only as good as its villain and in that regard this move scores well as Auric Goldfinger, played by Gert Frobe and voiced excellently by Michael Collins, is my favourite of the whole franchise. From the moment this portly, balding German sounding Englishman with awful dress sense walks into frame you instantly hate his character. However his plan, not to rob Fort Knox of gold as per the novel, but to detonate a nuclear bomb inside it so that his own gold’s stock rises is so genius (my favourite of the bad guy schemes) and with the hilarious delivery of “I expect you to die!” you can’t help but like the guy. He’s kind of like Die Hard’s Hans Gruber in that you really like him, but still want him to lose. Die Hard is superb, for many reasons, but one is that while the bad guy is strangely endearing, the hero is even more likeable. Here however James Bond is sort of a dick.

I know I called 007 a dick in my Dr No review and used the term to complement our spy but in Goldfinger I think it’s just much. Yes he bedded Taro, knowing he was going to have her arrested after, in Dr No and even struck Tania in From Russia with Love but Goldfinger crosses the line for me. The scene with Pussy Galore in the haystacks has been talked in depth a hell of a lot and I used to defend it slightly in an awful Robin Thicke “you know you want it” (no Robin, they don’t, you creep) way to imply Pussy Galore really wanted Bond, but didn’t want to give into her feelings and I think that is what movie makers were going for, but Pussy fights Bond way too long for that to work. On this rewatch it reminded me of the awful Jamie/Cercei Lannister scene in Game of Thrones where the director wanted it to come across as one thing, but to the viewer it did kind of look like Jamie raped her and the show swept it under the rug never to be mentioned again. I watched Goldfinger this time with my thirteen year old sister, trying to get her into James Bond like I did when I was her age, so I was very sensitive to how women were being treated here what with the haystacks scene and when Bond slaps Dink on the arse and tells her to leave with “Man’s talk.” I’ll justify the Dink moment as just a relic of the sixties but at the least it dates the movie a lot. What I can’t justify however is Bond slagging off the Beatles! What the hell James?! At least they chose a band that stood the test of time as Moneypenny trying to seduce Bond with Barry, bloody, Manilow in the Living Daylights makes me cringe.

While we are talking about pop acts shall we mention Bassey’s theme? Do I like it? Yes. Do I love it? No. I respect the song a lot and when it comes on the radio I might sing along and it might sneak into my top ten themes, but not into my top five or anything. You all know the song though, so the fact it’s so famous is another huge plus for this film. I don’t really like Robert Brownjohn’s credit sequence however as while projecting the casts faces onto gold women sounds great on paper it actually gives away small spoilers for later on in the movie and he seems to run out of footage as time goes on and uses first what appears to be a deleted scene and secondly a clip from From Russia with Love. This was the last time Brownjohn did the credits as for the next movie Maurice Binder would get the job again and would retain it until Piece Brosnan’s first Bond film and the next movie’s title sequence would set the benchmark for them all. John Barry I feel was better on this film, using the Bond theme more wisely and scarcely, though he did sadly drop the 007 theme. I especially liked Barry using the chimes whenever Oddjob appeared and especially when you first catch a glimpse of Shirley Eaton’s Jill Masterson covered in gold. It’s a moment that could have been laughable, but thanks to Connery’s acting and the score it comes across as horrific like it should.

Oddjob for many people is the greatest henchman of all time (in my top three) and he does start two much-copied henchman tropes by being silent and super strong and you can see Oddjob copycats in guys like For Your Eyes Only’s Emile Leopard Locke (silent), Octopussy’s Gobinda (strong), Spectre’s Mr Hinx (silent and super strong) and of course most famously in Jaws. Even with the great deadly bowler hat gimmick Oddjob could have been just another grunt like so many later henchman will be, but Harold Sakata is just wonderful in this role and it’s his smiling portrayal that make Oddjob one of cinema’s best ever bad guys, even more so than Goldfinger himself. Sakata, an Olympic weightlifting silver medallist and former pro-wrestler, was described by director Guy Hamilton as “absolutely charming man” and Harold was actually badly burned during his death scene when he “blew a fuse”, but he still kept hold of his hat to make sure the take looked good. Goldfinger and Oddjob are the best Villain-Henchman pair in any Bond movie.

Honour Blackman, from hit television show The Avengers, was also a delight as Pussy Galore, a name that was nearly changed, particularly in America, to Kitty Galore, but thankfully Pussy remained and Blacktook tried to use the name as much as possible in interviews to promote the movie in effort to cause embarrassment to her hosts. I love Pussy at first (that was an odd thing to type) and think she’s superb deflecting Bond’s flirtations and there’s one exchange with Bond that made me very happy. Bond had previously seen Oddjob kill Jill’s sister Tilly (Tania Mallet) and patronisingly tells this to Pussy in hopes of getting her to switch allegiances with “Do you know he kills little girls like you?” but Galore has none of Bond’s charm, replying with a confident “And little boys too.” It’s just too bad that for all her bravado it’s not Goldfinger planning to kill all the Fort Knox guards, as opposed to using sleeping gas on them like he said he was going to, that gets Pussy to change her ways, but James Bond’s magic penis. It is especially bad after her claim earlier that she was “immune” to him. In the book she was a lesbian and James converts her, so I am glad they didn’t go down the ‘Bond can convert gay women route, but they could have handled it better. Hey at least Galore is competent in judo, and her Flying Circus and her are all competent pilots which is a huge improvement over the damsel in distresses archetype of Honey Ryder and was oddly forward thinking in the sixties, especially from Ian Flemming who has never been accused of being politically correct.

Jill Masterson thanks to the legendary death is a famous Bond girl, but she doesn’t get much to do in her two scenes. Tilly has a bit more of an arc, being out for revenge for her sister which I would love to have seen explored more as a similar Bond girl wanting revenge worked so well in For Your Eyes Only, but she too is killed, again in a very memorable way. It is sad that both sisters died when you think about their family. God Oddjob’s a bastard. A loveable, charming bastard, but a bastard nonetheless. Tilly as the avenging angel is also responsible for my favourite shot in the movie when the camera focuses on Bond on a hill looking at Goldfinger before it zooms out to show Tilly looking at both Bond and our villain. I don’t really like Guy Hamilton’s Bond’s, but Goldfinger is good and his best by a wide margin and that shot was lovely.

The MI6 regulars all their usual wonderful selves, this was my favourite performances by Bernard Lee’s M and Louis Maxwell’s Moneypenny so far, and I liked Moneypenny being the one to throw Bond’s hat onto the rack. Jack Lord was set to return as his Dr No character Felix Leiter, but he demanded more money and a bigger role rivalling Connery’s, so he was axed sadly, but understandably. He was replaced by Cec Linder and I don’t know who this guy is, but it isn’t Felix. He looks way too old to be Bond’s equal, despite Linder being a year younger than Lord, a fact which astounds me. Desmond Llewelyn made his debut in the previous movie but this is where he truly became the Q we know and love. In perhaps Guy Hamilton’s cleverest stroke he told Llewelyn to play the role like he had contempt for Bond, confusing Desmond who said “What? But everyone loves Bond, why wouldn’t I like him?” before Hamilton replied with “Because he doesn’t bring your gadgets back in one piece” and with that bit of direction the friendly antagonistic relationship between Bond and the Quartermaster that defined Q’s character was born and he became the most beloved character of the franchise.

Mentioning Q I guess we have to talk about the iconic Aston Martin DB5. It’s such a beautiful car and the gadgets, especially the ejector seat, are superb. The actual chase leading up to the ejector seat moment and following on from it is rather disappointing however and we’ll have to wait a few more years to get a truly great car chase in cinema. The Aston Martin DB5 is the most popular car in Bond lore, and I do love it although it’s not my favourite, but I do hate its use in the Brosnan and Craig movies. It wasn’t so bad in Piece’s movie actually as while he did drive the Aston in a “look he’s Bond, honest!” way he later got his own great car to rival the DB5 whereas in the Craig movies it feels like they are constantly trying to remind us of better Bond movies and use the DB5 to syphon our goodwill from Goldfinger and Thunderball into the newer films rather than make us like them for what they are. Also Connery had a car, Moore had his Lotus, Dalton got his own cool Aston, Piece had his own, so why can’t Craig get his own signature car rather than ripping off Connery? And don’t even get me started on the fact it’s full of gadgets in Skyfall despite not having met Q yet…. But I’ll get to that when I come to the Craig era…

So I like the car but I like the scene where Q presents it to Bond even more. The “Ejector seat, you must be joking?” “I never joke about my work 007” exchange would be my favourite of the movie if there wasn’t a better one later on. Llewelyn’s deadly serious, almost angry, reply and Connery’s fading smile are simply perfect. My favourite lines of dialogue of course come from the famous laser scene and it’s also my favourite scene of the film too. Bond is in real peril, the most we’ve seen yet in a movie, and he’s against a villain who doesn’t want information, doesn’t want to recruit him, doesn’t want to talk and simply wants him dead in an entertaining fashion and Bond has no way to get out of it. No deux ex machina gadgets, nobody coming to his aid, just two words he overheard earlier and doesn’t know the meaning of. All he has is a bluff and as we saw earlier Goldfinger is not a good card-player and Bond has him beat. It’s such a gripping scene sold so well by everyone involved, especially by Bert Kwouk’s Mr Ling who walks back into shot upon hearing the words “Operation Grandslam” and I adore how it’s contrasted by Goldfinger who adopts a pokerface, trying not to give out any signals, whereas Mr Ling gives the game away.

I want to talk briefly about Ken Adams sets as he returned to the franchise for this movie and again they are beautiful. The set in the laser scene and his Fort Knox are just amazing, but the one I simply love is the set used when Goldfinger is talking to the mobsters about his plan. Adams has rotating pool tables, automatic shutters and an opening floor with a mechanical model of Fort Knox. We are a couple of movies away from his real masterpiece, but this is simply fantastic.

Sadly that set is displayed during the worst scene in the movie. Goldfinger tells the annoying mobsters, complete with 1920’s Chicago accents and terrible dialogue “The floor’s moving” “What’s going on?” “Turn on the lights”, about his plan and he kills the guy who wants no part of it (I do love that the turned him and the car he was murdered in into a cube, that was amazingly horrible) but then he kills the mobsters who wanted in on the plan too, so what was the point of the scene?! I get it was so Bond, and the viewers, would know what Goldfinger’s plan was, or at least his fake plan, but it was so badly written and thought-out. We have had three Bond movies in three years, with the fourth movie released the following year and I am thinking that maybe they are trying to do too much too soon and are making sloppy writing mistakes like this. Also Oddjob, you know I love you, but I do not believe you would be willing to be blown up by an atom bomb to protect Goldfinger’s plan, especially when it had already failed by that point.

Lastly I wanted to say how much I liked the pre-title sequence and I really enjoy when Bond movies give us a mini-story unrelated to the rest of the plot in a "Here's Bond, he's awesome, now onto the film proper" way. The most recent pre-title sequence not connected to the story was way back in A View to a Kill and I think it's about time they brought them back.

I do have some flaws with this film and having watched three Bond movies in four days now I was worried I might be getting too much of a good thing, but Goldfinger is still enjoyable even after having watched it some twenty something times. Let’s see if that continues with Thunderball…

8/10- It’s Goldfinger! What else is there to say? While it’s a weaker movie compared to From Russia with Love it’s one of the very best of the franchise. Try not to overthink things and just enjoy all the famous scenes.

Best quote: “Do you expect me to talk?”, “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!”

Best scene: It’s the laser scene. I know, shocker.

Kick-ass moment: Bond killing the guy by hitting the light into the bathtub. “Shocking. Positively shocking.”

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we enter 1965 with killer go-go girls in an exploitation cult classic.